Slavoj Zizek Biography

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek (born 1949) is an academic star,
the "Elvis of Cultural Studies," according to one
often-quoted journalistic formulation. His lectures, dealing in ideas
that are often dense to the point of impenetrability, draw crowds
numbering in the hundreds, with their mix of philosophical theory and
topical political ideas, both often illustrated by examples drawn from
American popular culture.

Zizek talks as fast as he thinks, and writes nearly as fast as he can talk
(he has published as many as three books in the course of a single year),
often making things even more difficult for the reader with a style of
argument in which he often seems to contradict himself. James Harkin,
writing in the London
Guardian
, called him "a one-man heavy industry of cultural
criticism." Yet Zizek's fame rests on more than sheer mental
agility. Consistent with his origins in Communist-era Yugoslavia, Zizek
has espoused Marxist-Leninist ideas, which have remained current in
academic circles even as they have lost ground in the wider political
sphere. Zizek has reinvigorated Marxist-Leninist thought with an approach
that brings together philosophy, psychology, film studies, humor, and
engaging prose. His writing encompasses both political philosopher Karl
Marx and film comedian Groucho Marx. Documentary filmmaker Astra Taylor,
who made a film about Zizek, told Reyhan Harmaci of the
San Francisco Chronicle
that Zizek seems "to make intellectualism exciting and fun and
vital in a climate of anti-intellectualism." In Zizek's own
biography on the website of the European Graduate School, where he is a
faculty member, he indicated that he "uses popular culture to
explain the theory of [French philosopher] Jacques Lacan and the theory of
Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture."

Grew Up Under Communism

A native and lifelong resident of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Slavoj Zizek
(SLAH-voy ZHEE-zhek) was born on March 21, 1949, when the small Alpine
capital was part of Communist Yugoslavia. An only child, he grew up in the
household of professional parents. Like many other young people in the
former satellite states of the Soviet Union, he consumed Western popular
culture avidly in preference to officially approved domestic television,
books, and films. Much of his encyclopedic knowledge of Hollywood cinema
was acquired during his teenage years, when he spent long hours at an
auditorium that specialized in showing foreign films. The "Prague
spring" reform movement of 1968 in Czechoslovakia during which
Czechs agitated for greater freedom but were repressed by the Soviet
Union, had an important effect on Zizek, even though he was not one of the
demonstrators agitating in favor of greater freedom.

Zizek was in the Czech capital when Soviet troops invaded, and he observed
the collision of totalitarian power with the aspirations of ordinary
people. "I found there, on the central square, a café that
miraculously worked through this emergency," he told Rebecca Mead
of the
New Yorker
. "I remember they had wonderful strawberry cakes, and I was
sitting there eating strawberry cakes and watching Russian tanks against
demonstrators. It was perfect."

Not that Zizek was a supporter of Communist orthodoxy. As an undergraduate
at the University of Ljubljana he read widely, not sticking to approved
course lists. He spoke six languages, and immersed himself in the works of
Lacan,
Jacques Derrida, and other philosophers, mostly French, whose writings had
found little favor in socialist circles. In the case of Lacan, that
philosopher's work relied on psychology—a suspect science
from a collectivist point of view because of its preoccupation with the
self and the individual mind. Zizek would, in time, set out to reconcile
that seeming dichotomy.

Zizek earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and sociology in
1971, and then pursued a master's degree, also at the University of
Ljubljana, writing his master's thesis on the French philosophers
whose ideas he had been studying. The brilliance of his thesis stirred up
interest among the university's philosophy faculty, but its
ideologically suspect qualities were more troublesome. Finally, after
being forced to add an appendix in which he outlined the divergences of
his ideas from approved Marxist theory, Zizek was awarded a
master's degree in philosophy in 1975. The taint on his reputation
kept him from finding a teaching position. For several years Zizek
depended on his work as a translator to pay his bills, but in 1977 he gave
in to pressure and joined the Communist Party. This opened up government
speechwriting jobs, as well as the chance to take a job as a researcher at
the Institute of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana
in 1979. He retained that position for the next several decades, even
after gaining international renown.

Worked as Speechwriter

In 1981 Zizek headed to Paris, where he studied with Lacan's
son-in-law and was psychoanalyzed by him. He finished a dissertation and
received his doctoral degree from the university that year. By that time
Zizek had emerged as something of an expert on Lacan, and as the leader of
a group of so-called Ljubljana Lacanians, contributing to a level of
familiarity with Lacan in Slovenia that perhaps exceeded even that in
France itself.

Zizek's playful side began to emerge during this period, when he
wrote, under a pen name, a negative review of one of his own books.
Sometimes during his career Zizek would seem to adopt one position and
then switch to the exact opposite, but this tendency had roots in the
dialectical tradition of philosophy in which his thought was
rooted—the conviction that truth is ultimately obtained through the
resolution of a series of opposites or conflicts. Zizek's first
book published in the West was
The Sublime Object of Ideology
(1989), which focused on the greatest of all the dialectical
philosophers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), through
the prism of Lacan's thought. It was a daring combination; Zizek
drew new links between philosophy and psychology by considering how these
thinkers treated the idea of the Other—anything that is not part of
the Self.

Zizek also cultivated his more public persona during the 1980s, a period
during which Yugoslavia's Communist central government gradually
began to lose control over the country's cultural life. He penned a
popular newspaper column, and in 1990, when Slovenia was on the brink of
independence from Yugoslavia (achieving it after a ten-day war in 1991),
he entered the race to become part of the group of four leaders who would
hold the country's joint presidency. Of the five candidates, he
finished fifth, and was thus not elected. It was at this time that the
impressive spurt in Zizek's productivity began. He was living
alone; a marriage from the early 1970s, which produced a son, had ended,
and his second and third marriages (the second produced another son) were
still in the future. Zizek had few responsibilities other than to think
and write. His post was that of researcher, and he rarely if ever taught
classes.

Partly this kind of financial freedom for an academic was a holdover from
the Communist system, in which intellectuals were considered an important
part of the theoretical underpinning of the state, and were thus
financially supported if they were seen to be making useful contributions.
Zizek cherished this freedom. As his fame grew, he was frequently offered
teaching positions in the United States, where he garnered a strong
following in university cultural studies departments. He turned them all
down, although he cheerfully accepted visiting scholar appointments and
often spent much of the year traveling from one academic center to
another. "When people ask me why I don't teach permanently
in the United States," Zizek was quoted as saying in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, "I tell them that it is because American universities have this
very strange, eccentric idea that you must work for your salary. I prefer
to do the opposite and not work for my salary."

Used Film to Illustrate Ideas

In any event, Zizek repaid his university's investment by bringing
international intellectual attention to tiny Slovenia. He turned out books
quickly, and they were translated into some 20 languages; in the United
States many were published by Verso in New York, which profited from its
association with Zizek, for the books sold well. Zizek communicated and
expanded upon Lacan's difficult ideas about perception, desire, and
aggression by illustrating them with examples drawn from decades of
popular films that students and general readers knew well. Zizek's
own books, such as
Looking Awry; An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture
(1991) and
Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
(1992), were joined on bookstore shelves by collections of articles he
edited, including
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask
Hitchcock)
(1992).

Zizek's international fame grew after a 1997 essay written by the
influential British literary critic Terry Eagleton was published in the
London Review of Books
. The essay reviewed several of Zizek's books and concluded, as
quoted in
Contemporary Authors
, that they "have an enviable knack of making [Continental
philosophers] Kant or Kierkegaard sound riotously exciting; his writing
bristles with difficulties but never serves up a turgid sentence."
It was around this time that Zizek's lectures began to attract
large crowds of young intellectuals. Police had to be called to a Zizek
appearance at a Lower Manhattan art gallery after the shutout portion of
an overflow crowd began banging on the building's windows,
demanding admission. Nor was his fame confined to America and Europe; a
documentary film,
Zizek!
, followed the philosopher to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where similar
crowds awaited him.

Zizek's popularity was due partly to the dizzying virtuosity of his
speeches, which were free form traversals of the history of philosophy,
mixed with observations on anything from the
Matrix
film series to surfing, to world events, to theology (although an
atheist, Zizek was fascinated by the figure of Saint Paul, seeing in him
an analogue to early Soviet Communist leader Vladimir Lenin in terms of
building an organization motivated by ideas). One audience member at a
Zizek talk told Scott McLemee, author of the "Zizek Watch,"
a column published in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
, "I have no idea where we just went, but that was one wild
trip." Another explanation of Zizek's success came from
McLemee, who noted the theorist's continuing enthusiasm for
American films. "One source of Slavoj Zizek's lasting appeal
as a cultural theorist is that he provides a really good excuse to go to
the video store," McLemee wrote.

Zizek also showed a knack for keeping himself in the headlines, at least
those of intellectual journals. He broadened the focus of his writing to
include current events, and he even contributed an essay to the staid U.S.
journal
Foreign Policy
that examined the psychological motivations behind the failed U.S. search
for weapons of mass destruction during the Iraq war.
The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway
(2000) was one of several Zizek tomes on contemporary entertainment. With
Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and
Related Dates
, Zizek showed an uncharacteristic tendency to edit himself, recalling the
book several times for revisions as it went through subsequent printings.
Zizek's
Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
(2004) critiqued not only the rationale for war but also explored
psychological factors involved in the restrictions placed on American
civil liberties after the September 11 attacks.

Academic fashions come and go, but as of the mid-2000s the bearded Zizek
had spent nearly a decade as what Carlin Romano of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
called "the ultimate hottie in recent years on the global
intellectual circuit." In April of 2005 he married a 27-year-old
Argentine model. He joined the faculty of the European Graduate School, an
international institute of communications theory with locations in several
countries, and he worked for an unusually long time on
The Parallax View
, a lengthy philosophical tract that attempted to redefine the dialectical
idea itself, leaving room, as ever, for discussions of films, the war on
terror, and hot topics such as neuroscience. By the time it was published,
Zizek had moved on to a new book,
In Defense of Lost Causes
, in which he discussed the Christian legacy, class struggle, and problems
in the world of theory itself. The book was slated for publication in the
summer of 2007.